Fascinating rhythms If street art made a baby with Frank Stella's 1960s geometric abstractions, the offspring would look something like Matt Rich's show "Ghost Muscle" at Samson (450 Harrison Ave Boston, through April 28).

Totems The Cree artist plays his drag show for laughs, but underlying it are serious questions about white genocide of Native American societies, about the stereotyping of Natives, and about gays in America, as well as Native American society.

On view January 14, 2012 to April 29, 2012 Selections from "Shapeshifting: Transformations in Native American Art", which is on display at the Peabody Essex Museum from January 14, 2012 to April 29, 2012.

Through March 17, 2012 + Through May 6, 2012 ''Histories of Now: Six Artists from Cairo'' is at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts through March 17, 2012. "Memory as Medicine'' is on display through May 6, 2012 at Wellesley College’s Davis Museum.

View finder Holt is part explorer, part surveyor, part hippie/New Age dreamer. And this thorough survey of her art from 1966 to '80 shows her finding her way to becoming one of the pioneers of the "Land Art" or "Earthworks" movement.

Regional pride "Contemporary and Boston, Opposites No Longer," a New York Times headline announced in October. It was another alert that $1 billion invested in expanding and endowing local museums over the past decade is paying off in a newly vigorous Boston contemporary art scene.

Intimate grandeur The challenge from the start of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum expansion project was: how do you follow up a masterpiece? The 99-year-old Fenway institution is world-renowned for its old-master collection installed in dramatic period rooms inside a dream of a Renaissance Venetian palazzo.